This is a bit of iron that I saw lying on the ground when I was on a recent early morning poodlewalk with Kayla. The iron was laying on the beach amongst the seagrass, and it was from the rebuilding of the causeway to Granite Island that had been happening during 2021.
It had been raining that morning. The sky was still heavily overcast and so I did not need to take account of the early morning sunlight shining directly onto the iron.
We can interpret the remarks in this earlier post about art historians dismissing photographic abstraction in Australia as suggesting that the curators and art historians don't consider photographic abstraction worthy of their attention or requiring them to devote their time to researching to exploring it. They hold that photography in Australia is the realist art par excellence and despite the abstractions of the interior land and the coastlines in Western Australian by Richard Woldendorp they see photographic abstraction as too minor a genre in art photography, to bother establishing a tradition.
However, it needs to be remembered that abstraction in photography did happen during modernism when painting was the vehicle of art history, and that it continues to happen in our post historical present, Abstraction was the meaning of art history in the modernist narrative, but in our post historical period of a pluralistic art world, abstraction is a possibility, something that photographers can do if they wish. And they do.
In the afternoon of the same day I walked amongst the coastal rocks between Petrel Cove and Kings Head with Maleko and made this orange and black abstract below:
This image, like the iron one, is an abstraction from everyday objects. So how do we understand abstraction in photography?
There is a limited literature on abstraction and photography with the standard interpretation of abstraction in photography being the formalist one, which are variations on the desire to turn photography into the production of non-representation and non-figuration. This expresses a desire to turn away from, or to displace, the picturing things, in order to "free" photography from representation. An abstract photography is one that does not refer to a reality outside the picture and instead only refers to itself.
But what if abstraction can be understood as not just the absence of depiction? Could there be an account of abstraction as a restricted form of depiction, in which one has the experience of seeing spatial relations—notably relations of depth between planes, colours or lines—in a flat surface, but not volumetric forms or everyday objects?
There could be a proto abstraction, namely It typically depicts recognizable objects, but framed or lit in such a way as to draw attention, when photographed, to the resulting image’s design properties. This is achieved by a combination of bold and simplified gestalts, unusual points of view, strong lighting, close ups and other crops that direct attention to visual patterning in the image. The iron image above would be an example.